Nisht kayn Desdemona, nisht kayn Dzulieta
Yiddish Adaptations of The Merchant of Venice and the Early Modern Father-Daughter Bond
Abstract
This essay examines three Yiddish "readings" of The Merchant of Venice — Joseph Bovshover's translation (1899), Avrom Morevski's critical essay (1937), and Maurice Schwartz's stage adaptation (1947) — that deal with Shylock's apparent betrayal by his daughter Jessica. Although these readings reflect sociocultural preoccupations with losing a daughter to intermarriage in a violently anti-Semitic environment, they also pick up on concerns present in the early modern English rendering of the father-daughter relationship and the sense of filial duty that informed it. Bovshover, Morevski, and Schwartz, I will argue, seem to have "read into" Shakespeare a correlation between the figure of the rebellious daughter and a wider preoccupation, shared in a sense by the early modern English and early twentieth-century Jews, with threats to national identity.